Aluminium the Metal-1

More aluminium is produced each year than any other non-ferrous metal. For this reason, it is difficult to believe that aluminium was only discovered some 160 years ago and has been produced in industrial quantities for only the last 100 years.

Aluminium is the third most abundant element in the earth’s crust. So, why has it not been used for centuries, as has gold or copper? The main answer is that it is never found in its natural form as a pure metal. Aluminium is always locked in, or mixed with, other elements. Aluminium occurs in most rocks, vegetation, soils etc., in this combined form as very stable chemical compounds such as alumino-silicates.

Some aluminium-bearing compounds were used by man from the earliest times. Primitive man made pottery from clays containing hydrated aluminium silicate. The Egyptians and Babylonians used aluminium salts for the preparation of dyes and medicines.

In 1807, Sir Humphrey Davy, the British scientist, established the existence of the element aluminium. Incidentally he called his elusive element "Aluminum", the spelling which is still used in the USA. Following Davy s work, H C Oersted of Denmark isolated small lumps of the metal by heating potassium amalgam with aluminium chloride. By 1845 Wohler, a German scientist, had established a range of properties, including the determination of aluminium s specific gravity, the property which paved the way for the industrial development of aluminium, its lightness!